Write a widget once and run it on every device that provides a widget runtime - that´s the idea. Here at Vodafone, we test widgets on a lot of different platforms. When it comes to testing on devices with a very high resolution display, we often encounter widgets that look like this one:

Fonts are too small to be read easily, touchable areas are too small to be touched comfortably and the full screen is not used. From a technical point of view, the widget runs, but it does not scale. Scalable means that the widget adapts to the device specific characteristics to give the user the best experience possible on the specific device. Certainly not the case in the above example.

But it´s not that hard to create a scalable widget. We have extended our guideline ‘Different Resolutions on Mobile Devices’, which will help you to create scalable widgets. In comparison to the previous version, we extended the discussion about the ppi value and added information about different resolutions and the effects on widgets as well as a section with general techniques to deal with these effects. Furthermore, we show you in a detailed step by step example how to use the explained techniques in practice.

So we urgently recommend you download the new version of the document and check out how to make your widget scale for differente resolutions.